To Lee, millions had always been associated with vulgarity, as belonging exclusively to low-born people whom Mrs. Montgomery would not have permitted to cross her door-mat. It is doubtful if her father or Mr. Montgomery or Mr. Brannan had ever been worth eight hundred thousand dollars, although they had been stars of the first magnitude in their day. Colonel Belmont had left little more, and the Yorbas and Gearys were the only families of the old set who were known by their riches. The great wealth of these had meant nothing to Lee; Mrs. Montgomery lived quite as well, and entertained far more brilliantly. Her own income had seemed very large to her, her jump from eighty dollars a month to nearly a thousand one of the glittering romances of California. She had sincerely pitied the people whose malodorous opulence made them the target of the terrible Mr. Bierce, and whose verbal infelicities had contributed standing jests to those outer rings of Society which had opened to them. To-day she was almost ready to envy them bitterly, to barter her honoured name and illustrious kin for their ungrammatical millions.
Lord and Lady Barnstaple and Lady Mary Gifford, even the speechless Miss Pix, had succeeded in making her feel as guilty as if Cecil were a half-witted boy whom she had entrapped. One of the great homes of England—one, moreover, to which he was passionately attached—was the price he had paid for his wife. She was too charged with the arrogance of youth and beauty to wonder if he would live to regret his choice; but she was far-sighted enough in other matters, and she was as certain of his capacity for suffering as for deep and intense affection. The day he lost the Abbey he would cease to be Cecil Maundrell.
And she had cause bitterly to reproach herself; Randolph had begged her to sell her ranch and invest in the Peruvian mine. She had replied that she “had enough,” in tranquil scorn of the United Statesian’s frantic lust for gold. If she had only known! She conceived a humble and enduring respect for a metal that meant so much more to man than the response to his material wants and his greed.
She went to the edge of the wood, and looked down on the Abbey. Its lids seemed lowered in haughty mute reproach. She saw a thousand new beauties in it, and knew that she should shake and thrill with the pride of its possession, exult in the destiny which had made it her home, were it not that the stranger bided his time at the gates.
Had Cecil Maundrell been mad? Were all men really mad when they loved a woman? Or had it been that he, too, had but an abstract appreciation of the value of money? This splendid estate had fitted him too easily, and he had worn it too long, for it not to seem as inevitable as the stars, in spite of much desultory talk; and his personal wants were simple, and had always been liberally supplied.
She turned her back on the Abbey, which seemed actually to lift its lids and send her a glance of stern appeal, and returned to her nook. What should she do? There was not a cell of morbid matter in her brain; she contemplated neither suicide nor divorce—in favour of Miss Pix. There seemed but one solution of the difficulty. She must find a million—dollars, if not pounds. The latter were desirable, but the former would do. She decided to write to Randolph that very day. He had a genius for making money, and he must place it at her disposal.
She heard the sound of many voices rising with the slight ascent between the Abbey and the wood, and hastily sought the deceptive shades beyond. These people had been very charming to her the night before, and she had no doubt that she should, in time, like all good Americans, fall under their spell; but at present she rather resented their failure to differentiate between herself and “Emmy.” And she was harassed, and they were not her “own sort.”
CHAPTER V
SHE escaped from the wood into her tower, and wrote a letter to Randolph. She made no attempt at diplomacy; she told him the truth. Randolph loved her, and she was a woman of sufficient humour, but there was no one else to appeal to, and she argued that he would respect her frankness; and it had been his habit for many years to obey her commands. Moreover, in the sequestered recesses of his brain he was a Southerner, chivalrous and impulsive. She believed that he must by now have accepted the fact that she was another man’s wife, and she believed that he would help her.
After breakfast, which she took in solitude, as she was very late, she went to call on her mother-in-law, who had graciously intimated the night before that she would be visible at twelve. The maid conducted her to a suite of apartments removed from Lord Barnstaple’s by almost the width of the building, and Lee wondered if he had caused the walls to be padded. The bedroom was certainly very pink, and as fluffy as much lace and fluttering silk could make it. Miss Pix, in a white serge tailor-made frock, was seated in a large carved chair, with her profile in bold relief. Lady Barnstaple, in a pink peignoir, looked like a ball of floss in the depths of an arm chair. She smiled radiantly as Lee entered.